Tompkins: Shrimping a tricky issue

$3 saltwater surcharge not going away any time soon

Published 5:30 am, Thursday, June 3, 2004

Reducing commercial shrimping effort on Texas bays stands to profit those bays and the Texans who derive their livelihoods, recreation and other quality-of-life benefits from coastal waters.

Texas' 600,000-plus recreational coastal anglers look to be the likely touches for what promises to be the expensive proposition of accomplishing that reduction in inshore shrimping effort.

Under plans still in the formative stages, the $3 surcharge Texas saltwater anglers have since 2000 paid on their annual saltwater fishing stamp will be extended beyond its scheduled termination and used to fund an accelerated buyout of commercial shrimping licenses.

The $3 surcharge, which the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission added to the $7 saltwater fishing stamp beginning Sept. 1, 2000, was designed as the main funding mechanism for the Legislature-created buy-out of commercial fishing licenses.

The surcharge, which annually generates about $1.5 million, was approved with a five-year life span and set to expire Aug. 31, 2005.

But little more than a year before the "temporary" surcharge is set to vanish, Texas Parks and Wildlife Department staff are suggesting to the commission that extending the surcharge is warranted if the commission expects the agency to continue having an effective buyout program.

Also private supporters of reducing inshore shrimping effort and its deleterious effects on marine life and habitat are floating a proposal to use the $3 surcharge to pay for a multi-million dollar revenue bond package.

The revenue bonds — $10 million or so — would be used to fund a fast-track buyout of commercial shrimping licenses as part of a plan to reduce Texas current bay inshore shrimping fleet from its current 1,600 or so boats to no more than 400 boats, coastwide, by 2007.

This past week, Larry McKinney, director of TPWD's coastal fisheries and TPWD executive director Robert Cook briefed the commission's regulations committee on the department's shrimp-license buy-back program and the issue of the saltwater stamp surcharge's approaching elimination.

Inshore commercial shrimping has been a volatile issue for more than two decades. Shrimping in Texas bays shot through the roof in the early 1980s, with more than 5,000 commercial licenses issued.

Fisheries managers and recreational anglers also point to trawl by-catch of finfish, species such as flounder, sand trout, croaker, and other fish inadvertently trapped and killed in shrimp trawls. By-catch was identified as one of the limiting factors in recovering or maintaining important recreational and commercial fisheries.

Increased competition and costs of operation consistently have made it tougher for shrimpers to make a living at their work.

In 1995, the Texas Legislature created a limited-entry program for the inshore shrimp fishery, capping the number of shrimp licenses at 1995 levels and setting up a license buy-back program whereby TPWD could purchase shrimping licenses from voluntary sellers, then permanently retire those licenses.

The buy-back program got off to a slow start, as it was funded only through a surcharge on commercial shrimping licenses and a relatively small federal grant. Those funding mechanisms gave TPWD about $160,000 a year with which to buy and retire shrimping licenses.

The $3 surcharge and the $1.3-$1.5 million it annually has generated since 2000 has greatly accelerated the buy-back of shrimping licenses, Cook and McKinney told the commission.

Through the voluntary buy-back program, TPWD has now spent more than $6 million purchasing and retiring more than 1,000 of those 3,231 licenses, McKinney said.

Although the buy-back program has reduced by one-third the number of shrimp licenses, it has not reduced shrimping effort to the level TPWD would like to see.

TPWD fisheries managers would like to get shrimping effort and commercial catch rates to that of the 1970s, McKinney said. It is hard to say how many shrimp licenses the agency would have to buy to get shrimping effort and shrimping catch rates back to those levels, he said.

With new technology such as GPS along with bigger and faster boats, shrimpers have become more efficient, McKinney said. So TPWD will have to continue monitoring shrimp catch rates and population status to tell when the shrimp license buyback program has reached its goal.

"But I can tell you that we are not going to be there (by September, 2005, when the saltwater stamp surcharge is set to expire),"Cook told the commission.

Currently, TPWD receives more offers from shrimpers willing to sell their licences than TPWD has available funding to spend on the buy-out, McKinney said.

That situation is one of the dilemmas a proposal currently called "Texas 2007" hopes to address, said Joey Park.

Park, who worked as TPWD's legislative liaison before becoming a private lobbyist in Austin, is roughing out the basics of Texas 2007, a proposal he hopes will gain support in the 2005 Texas Legislature.

As currently outlined, Texas 2007 would set a deadline of Aug. 31, 2007 as final expiration date for all current inshore (bay or bait) shrimping licenses.

After that date, TPWD would issue 400 commercial shrimping licenses (one license combining the current bay and bait licenses) to some of the shrimpers currently holding valid licenses.

Shrimpers wanting to voluntarily get out of the industry and sell their licenses back to the state would have to offer them to TPWD before that 2007 "drop dead" date.

Funding for the buy-back would come from $10 million or so in revenue bonds issued by the state, with TPWD mandated to use the money to buy and retire shrimping licenses.

With a pool of $10 million, TPWD should be able to buy almost all of the remaining shrimping licenses over about two years, Park said.

The bonds would be repaid using some of the $1.5 million or so annually generated from the $3 surcharge on the saltwater fishing stamp.

The idea would require action by the Texas Legislature.

The Legislature would have to pass a bill authorizing issuance of the bonds, their use in buying out remaining shrimpers and setting the certain-to-be-sticky frameworks for the transition to the 400-license shrimp fishery.

Whether the 2005 session of the Texas Legislature bites on the Texas 2007 idea remains a very open question.

What seems almost certain, however, is that the $3 surcharge on saltwater fishing stamps will not be going away any time soon.

Shannon Tompkins covers the outdoors for the Chronicle. He can be reached at shannon.tompkins@chron.com